In Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan takes Matthew McConaughey and his team on a trip through a worm hole to find a habitable planet for humanity but what’s the science behind it?

A worm hole is simply a black hole that connects two seemingly distant points by a tunnel vastly shorter in distance by taking advantage of higher dimensional settings – similar to two points on a piece of paper being connected by folding the sheet in two. Here the folding is happening in a higher dimensional space.

In the film we also see light bending around the worm hole as though it’s being pulled apart by gravity. In reality, the scenes were actually produced by simulating how a black hole of this type would really look to the astronomer approaching it.

In low-gravity regions, like on earth, we see light moving in straight lines. However, gravity produces small ripples in the space near large objects, which actually slightly curves the space in that neighbourhood. Black holes offer the ultimate kind of curvature near these stars, light continues to move in these straight line paths from its point of view of light, but for an astronomer some distance away, the full curved reality can be realised, which is the approach the filmmakers took.

Another important aspect that emerges in the film is the idea of an event horizon. These surfaces represent one-way boundaries over which information can only pass in one direction. In the film we see the people on the rocket hearing a loud sound when passing over this boundary but in real worm holes an astronomer wouldn’t actually know when crossing over this surface. An astronomer very far away would only ever see you slow down and never actually cross the horizon due to the stretching of light as you get closer to this boundary.

Lastly, the crew are plagued with time dilation. In stronger gravitational regions time runs slightly slower than in empty space. On earth this doesn’t amount to much but near a black hole the difference would be enormous. However, the gravitational pull would likely tear you apart before these effects became significant.

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